Once you have traced a grandparent or great grandparent through a birth/marriage certificate, the next step is to find out exactly where they lived and discover the members of their wider family. For this the Census records are an ideal tool.
As an example I recently looked up a famous Liverpool comedian to discover his roots.
Arthur Askey was well known to past generations and a great son of the city. But where was he born and where did his parents live?
I knew he was born around the turn of the century, so I typed in an 'all districts' search for a birth between 1880 and 1920 on the FreeBMD site - http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/
This gave me a list of 21 names. However, there was only one one possible result with a Liverpool entry in September 1900: Askey, Arthur Bowden, Toxteth Park Vol 8b Page 149.
If I had sent for the birth certificate it would have revealed his parents' names, but hopefully so would the 1901 Census when the baby Arthur would have been around one year old.
Sure enough, once I accessed the on-line return on the Ancestry website - www.ancestry.co.uk - there was the nine-month-old Arthur living at 29, Moses Street, Toxteth, with parents Samuel and Betsey, both aged 24 and his uncle Edward Bowden.
The Census now gives us more information: We discover that Arthur's father was working as a book-keeper and had been born in Liverpool, while his mother had been born in Northwich, Cheshire. As Betsey's brother was living with the family, we also discover Betsey's maiden name - Bowden - which became Arthur's middle name.
We will be tracing Arthur's ancestors back through the Census returns in later blogs.
So the 1901 Census is a powerful tool in establishing family links, places of birth and occupations of your ancestors. With around six million properties listed it also enables you to establish who was living in your house in 1901.
With more information available to us, we can start to delve further back to discover where Arthur's parents were living 10 years earlier in 1891 . . .
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